Western Massachusetts-based installation artist and painter Yura Adams has gotten to know the 500 feet surrounding her idyllic studio like the back of her hand.
Located in an industrial building on her farm, Yura’s studio nestles sweetly among wildlife and rivers—a perfect location for environmental observation. “As [a] self-appointed inspector of my environment, I gather perceptions of seasonal changes, workings of weather, wind, birds, and patterns of growth,” Yura writes in her artist statement.
Inspired by an impressive combination of bone-chilling cold, slippery ice, and blustering winds that swept across Massachusetts’ rural Berkshires region one winter, Yura created her recent Frostline Series. Caught in the cold, Yura created 12 abstract paintings over a six-week period. “The unrelenting cold required that I stay put in front of a space heater, so I sat and made these small works about the developments created by the season,” she says. Painted with frosty blues and a spectrum of winter-white hues, Yura’s Frostline Series captures the feeling of below-freezing temperatures.
Constantly inspired by rapid changes in her environment, Yura’s work hinges on the weather patterns that envelop her studio season after season. Her current solo show, Warm, Dark, and Roaring, illustrates the artist’s fascination with the marriage of science and its poetic interpretation. As the exhibition’s statement explains, “Science describes from outside, poetry describes from inside; science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what is revealed. Adams believes that we need the language of both to save us from political misdirection that fails to inform our relationship to our environment and surroundings […] Yura Adams is a painter who sees a world drawn from the poetry of nature.”
Warm, Dark, and Roaring is on view through December 17 at OLYMPIA Gallery. For more information, please visit the gallery here.
“I gather perceptions of seasonal changes, workings of weather, wind, birds, and patterns of growth.” — Yura Adams
Yura Adams: Website | Instagram
All photos published with permission of the artist(s).
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